How To Get Affiliates To Mail More Often

How to get your affiliates to mail more often1

So you’ve got your affiliates lined up for your big product launch or promotion. Now what? Getting a certain number of affiliates to mail once or twice for your promotion is one thing, but getting them to mail an extra one or two times (or even double or triple the times) they planned is what will take your affiliate program to the next level. Today I am going to show you how to get your affiliates to mail about your offer more often.

Today I’m going share with you 7 ways to get your affiliates to mail more often, which ultimately can double, triple or even exponentially grow your affiliate sales.

1. Set up one-on-one personal promotion plans

I’ve talked about this before, but one of the best things you can do to get your affiliates to mail more often is to create a personal promotion plan with them.

When you meet with your affiliates one-on-one before the promotion, you are able to craft a custom promotion plan with them.

I have found that when I meet with them one-on-one, they tend to agree to at least a few extra emails than they had previously planned on sending.

And as we know, the principles of commitment and consistency (Thanks, Robert Cialdini) means that what people commit to, they stick to.

So, when you create a personalize promotion plan (you can get the template here), more often than not, they stick to that plan. If anything, they will add to it, but they will never subtract from it.

I know I have personally done these plans with people whose products I’m promoting and when I have fallen short in the middle of a promotion, I have added extra emails to make up for it.

When I promise someone that I am going to mail eight times, then, by gosh, I’m going to mail eight times at a minimum!

THAT is the power of creating personalized promotion plans with your affiliates.

FREE RESOURCE: Click Here to get my sample promo plan to use with your affiliates

2. Mailing Plans

The reality is, you can’t meet with every single affiliate one-on-one.

Typically in a launch, if we have 500 affiliates promoting, I will meet with between 15 and 25 one-on-one.

For everyone else, you want to give them some generic mailing plans that they can use to plan their promotion.

We give them our “ABC Mailing Plans“.

ABC stands for:

All-In/Aggressive

Balanced

Conservative

Our objective here, much like with the personal promotion plans, is to get your affiliates to commit to some level of participation.

All we’re looking for is to get them to commit to a minimum number of emails.

What we’ve found is that affiliates who commit to the Conservative level will often move up to the Balanced (or even the All-In) level as the launch progresses.

They want to “dip their toe in the water” and see “is this promotion going to work for me?” And then, if looks like it’s working early on, they’ll get more aggressive as they go.

But the key here is to get them to commit to SOMETHING on the front end.

So we make it VERY easy to commit to the Conservative level. Typically the Conservative plan will include 2-4 emails to your entire list, 2-4 emails to unopens, and 2-4 emails to engaged contacts (usually optins).

This gets them to commit to between 6 and 8 emails total, which is a pretty easy commitment level, especially when as few as two of them are to their entire list.

3. Give Affiliates Their Optin List

As we mentioned about in the mailing plans, there comes a point during a launch when you want people only mailing to their optin list.

These are the people who have opted in for the free content (ebooks, video series, assessments, webinars, etc.).

The reason you would focus on emailing only these people is that these are your most engaged contacts. These are the people who have raised their hands and said “I am interested in this subject matter.”

Once the cart is opened, generally speaking, these are the contacts that you want to focus on.

Here’s an example of a recent promotional plan I put together when we promoted something:

Day 1 – entire list – ebook

Day 3 – entire list – video series

Day 5 – unopens – video series

Day 6 – entire list – video 2

Day 8 – entire list – webinar

Day 9 – unopens – webinar

Day 10 – unopens – webinar

Day 11 – entire list – webinar replay

Day 12 – entire list – cart open

Day 13-16 – optins only – cart open

Day 17 -5 emails (if you think that’s crazy, click here to learn why mailing more often works)

7am – entire list – deadline focus

12pm – optins only – deadline focus

7pm – optins only – deadline focus

12:05am – optins only – deadline focus

2am – optins only – deadline focus

Giving affiliates their optin list allows them to not have to mail their entire list as often and not have to worry about unsubscribes (although you shouldn’t really worry about unsubscribes!).

And if they mail their most engaged contacts more often, everybody wins.

4. Frequent Contests

Nothing moves people like a deadline, but contests are pretty close!

To get your affiliates to mail more often, focus on frequent, very short (24-48 hour) contests.

So this might be a contest just for webinar registrations, or a contest just for optins today, or a contest for sales on a day when sales are typically lower.

This encourages people to mail because often just one email could get somebody a very lucrative prize.

Here are some examples of actual contests that we have done:

Webinar Optins

1st Place – Caribbean Cruise for 2
Drawing (1 entry/optin) – $1,000 or Macbook Air

Looking for Contest Prizes? Check Out Our Affiliate Prize Database

Weekend Assessment Optins

1st Place – $2,500
2nd Place – $1,000
3rd Place – $500
Drawing (Anyone with 25+ optins – 2 winners) – $250 each

First Day Sales

1st Place – $1,000
Drawing (anyone with 1 sale) – $250

Close Cart Email Contest

Anyone who sends an email during specific 6 hour period – entered into contest for a ticket to the content creator’s live event

5. Educate Them

Teach your affiliates why mailing more often works. Or why emailing at a specific time works.

When we’re running launches I often share why mailing on the weekend is a good idea. And I share this on a Friday.

Remember, this is all about getting affiliates to add an extra email that they weren’t planning on sending.

FREE RESOURCE: If you want to get the full text of the weekend email that I send, Click here to get it for free

Help your affiliates understand WHY you want them to mail more.

Share with them data about how mailing more on cart close day will exponentially increase their sales (for example, mailing twice as much can increase sales by 120-200%), or how sending an email or two to unopens could drastically increase their commissions.

6. Killer Swipe Copy

One of the most important things you can do to get your affiliates to mail more often is to provide them with killer swipe copy that they can use for every step of the launch.

I’ve written before about my 5 tips for creating killer swipe copy, so I won’t go into a ton of detail here, but here’s the short version…

Hire a copywriter to write it – Yes, you could write the copy yourself, but a professional copywriter will be able to objectively create great copy that your affiliates (and their audience) will relate to. You’re just too close to your product to be objective.

Include images – Be sure to include at least one graphic that your affiliates can send with their swipe copy. If you don’t your affiliates will ask for it!

Write different versions for different audiences – Think about the different audiences that might buy your product and have swipe copy written for each of these audiences. These different versions will probably 85-90% the same, but a few tweaks will make it even more effective!

Write different lengths of swipe copy – Some of your affiliates will want to write emails that are 750 words are more, some will want a 300-word email and some will want just a short blurb for a newsletter. Be sure to provide various lengths to make it easy for your affiliates. (We’ve found the top affiliates send emails that are less than 250 words…)

Make it clear that the swipe copy is a guide only – The worst thing you can do is have 100 affiliates all send identical emails. Tell them to make the emails personal and only use the swipe copy as a starting point. You can also share this article with them on how to use swipe copy.

7. Pump Up The Milestones

Individually, with as many affiliates as possible (typically this will be your top 20-50 affiliates), you want to tell them where they stand.

This means sharing with them how many optins they have, how many sales they have, where they stand in relation to others, how far they are from 1st (or another position), how many sales they need to get to the next guaranteed prize level, etc.

The trick here is to find something that is practical for them to achieve.

Milestones for affiliates

So, let’s say first place has 100 sales, it’s 2 days until the end of the launch and the top affiliate has 100 sales and the affiliate in 14th place has 9 sales. It’s not practical that #14 is going to catch up to #1, it is, however, very practical that they could catch up to #10. So focus on how far they are from being in the Top 10.

If they aren’t going to achieve a leaderboard position, focus on the guaranteed prizes.

For example, “Hey, just wanted to let you know you are only 7 sales away from winning the 13″ MacBook Pro or $1,000!”

When you pump up these milestones, and really remind people where they stand and how they are doing it’s VERY encouraging.

We have found that every time we send one of these emails, the response is quite often, “Awesome Matt, I’ve scheduled another email for later today!”

So there you have it, 7 ways to get your affiliates to mail more often. Any one of these strategies could significantly increase the number of times your affiliates mail, but used together, you could see exponential and explosive growth.

What have you done to get your affiliates to mail more often?